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  Clifford D. Simak

  A real estate salesman is making a fortune leasing houses to families — except the houses remain empty.

  Clifford D. Simak

  Carbon Copy

  The man who came into Homer Jackson's office was wearing his left shoe on his right foot and his right shoe on his left.

  He gave Homer quite a start.

  The man was tall and had a gangling look about him, but he was smartly dressed—except for his shoes. And his shoes were all right, too; it was just the way he wore them.

  "Am I addressing Mr. Homer Jackson?" he asked with a formality to which Homer was entirely unaccustomed.

  "That's me," said Homer.

  He squirmed a bit uncomfortably in his chair. He hoped this wasn't one of Gabby Wilson's jokes.

  Gabby had an office just down the hall and loved to pester Homer plenty. When Gabby cooked up a joke, he did a massive job on it; he left out not a single detail. And some of Gabby's jokes got pretty rough.

  But the man seemed to be dead serious and perhaps a little anxious.

  "Mr. Homer Jackson, the suburban realtor?" he persisted.

  "That's right," said Homer.

  "Specializing in lake properties and country acreages?"

  "I'm your man." Homer began to feel uncomfortable. This man was spreading it on a trifle thick and Homer thought he could see Gabby's hand in it.

  "I'd like to talk with you. I have a matter of small business."

  "Fire away," said Homer, motioning toward a chair.

  The man sat down carefuUy, bolt upright in the chair. "My name is Oscar Steen," he said. "We're building a development on what is known as the Saunders place. We call it Happy Acres."

  Homer nodded. "I'm acquainted with the place. It's the only good holding on the lake. You were fortunate to get it."

  "Thank you, Mr. Jackson. We think that it is nice."

  "How are you getting on?"

  "We have just finished it. But now comes the most important part. We must get people onto the property."

  "Well," said Homer, "things are a little tough right now. Money has tightened up and the interest rates are higher. Washington is no help and besides that…"

  "We wondered if you'd be interested in handling it for us."

  Homer choked a little, but recovered quickly. "Well, now, I don't know. Those houses may be hard to sell. You'd have get a solid figure for them and the prices will run high. The stone wall you put around the place and those fancy gates all, I would suspect you have high-class houses. You have gone and made it into an exclusive section. There'll be only a certain class of buyer who might be interested."

  "Mr. Jackson," said Steen, "we have a new approach. We won't have to sell them. We're only leasing them."

  "Renting them, you mean."

  "No, sir, leasing them."

  "Well, it all comes out to the same thing in the end. You'll have to get a lot for them."

  "Five thousand."

  "Five thousand is an awful lot of money. At least, out here is. Five thousand a year comes to over four hundred a month and…"

  "Not for a year," corrected Steen. "For ninety-nine."

  "For what!"

  "Ninety-nine. We're leasing at five thousand dollars ninety-nine full years."

  "But, man, you can't do that! Why, that's absolutely crazy! Taxes would eat up…"

  "We're not so interested in making money on the houses as we are in creating business for our shopping centre."

  "You mean you have a shopping centre in there, too?"

  Steen allowed himself a smile. "Mr. Jackson, we obtain the property and then we build the wall to have some privacy so there can be no snoopers."

  "Yes, I know," said Homer. "It's smart to do it that way. Good publicity. Whets the public's interest. Gives you a chance to have a big unveiling. But that twelve-foot wall…"

  "Fourteen, Mr. Jackson."

  "All right, then, fourteen. And it's built of solid stone. I know—I watched them put it up. And no one builds walls of solid stone any more. They just use stone facing. The way you built that wall set you back a hunk…"

  "Mr. Jackson, please. We know what we are doing. In this shopping centre, we sell everything from peanuts to Cadillacs. But we need customers. So we build houses for our customers. We desire to create a good stable population of rather well-to-do families."

  Jumping to his feet in exasperation, Homer paced up and down the office. "But, Mr. Steen, you can't possibly build up enough business at your shopping centre by relying solely on the people in your development. For instance, how many houses have you?"

  "Fifty."

  "Fifty families are a mere drop in the bucket for a shopping centre. Even if every one of those fifty families bought all their needs from you—and you can't be sure they will—but if they did, you'd still have little volume. And you won't pick up any outside trade—not behind that wall, you won't."

  He stopped his pacing and went back to his chair. "I don't know why I'm upset about it," he told Steen. "It's no skin off my nose. Yes, I'll handle the development, but I can't handle leasing at my usual five per cent."

  "Oh, I forgot to tell you," said Steen. "You keep the entire five thousand."

  Homer gasped like a fish hauled suddenly from water.

  "On one condition," added Steen. "One has to be so careful. We have a bank, you see. Part of the shopping centre service."

  "A bank," Homer said feebly.

  "Chartered under the state banking regulations."

  "And what has a bank to do with me?"

  "You'll take ten per cent," said Steen. "The rest will be credited to your account in the Happy Acres Bank. Every time you lease a unit, you get five hundred cash; forty-five hundred goes into your bank account."

  "I don't quite see…"

  "There are advantages."

  "Yes, I know," Homer said. "It builds up your business. You're out to make that shopping centre go."

  "That might be one factor. Another is that we can't have you getting rich in front of all your friends and neighbours. There'd be too much talk about it and we don't want that kind of publicity. And there are tax advantages as well."

  "Tax advantages?"

  "Mr. Jackson, if you lease all fifty houses, you will have earned a quarter million dollars. Have you figured what the income tax might be on a quarter million dollars?"

  "It would be quite a lot."

  "It would be a crying shame," said Steen. "The bank could be a help."

  "I don't quite see how."

  "You leave that to us. Leave everything to us. You just lease the houses."

  "Mr. Steen, I've been an honest man for years in an occupation where there's opportunity…"

  "Honesty, Mr. Jackson. Of course we know you're honest. That's why we came to you. Have you got your car here?"

  "It's parked outside."

  "Fine. Mine is at the station getting serviced. Let's drive out and look the houses over."

  The houses were all that anyone could wish. They were planned with practical imagination and built with loving care.

  There was, Homer admitted to himself, more honest workmanship in them than he had seen for many years in this era of mass-production building. They had that quiet sense of quality material, of prideful craftsmanship, of solidity, of dignity and tradition that was seldom found any more.

  They were well located, all fifty of them, in the wooded hills that stretched back from the lake, and the contractor had not indulged in the ruthless slashing out of trees. Set in natural surroundings with decent amounts of space around them, they stood, each one of them, in comparative privacy.

  In the spring, there would be wildflowers, and in the autumn, the woods would flame with colour
and there would be birds and squirrels and rabbits. And there was a stretch of white sand beach, the last left on the whole lake.

  Homer began mentally to write the ad he'd put in the Sunday paper and found that he looked forward with some anticipation to setting down the words. This was one he could pull out all the stops on, use all the purple prose he wanted.

  "I like it, Mr. Steen," he said. "I think they won't be too hard to move."

  "That is good," Steen replied. "We are prepared to give you an exclusive contract for a period of ten years. Renewable, of course."

  "But why ten years? I can get this tract handled in a year or two, if it goes at all."

  "You are mistaken. The business, I can assure you, will be continuing."

  They stood on the brick walk in front of one of the houses and looked toward the lake. There were two white sails on the water, far toward the other shore, and a rowboat bobbed in the middle distance, with the black smudge of a hunched fisherman squatted in the stern.

  Homer shook his head in some bewilderment. "I don't understand."

  "There'll be some subletting," Steen told him smoothly.

  "When fifty families are involved, there are always some who move."

  "But that's another story. Subletting…"

  Steen pulled a paper from his pocket and handed it to Homer. "Your contract. You'll want to look it over. Look it over closely. You're a cautious man and that's the kind we want."

  Homer drove along the winding, wooded road back to the shopping centre with Steen.

  The centre was a lovely place. It stretched along the entire south side of the property, backed by the fourteen-foot wall, and was a shining place of brand-new paint and gleaming glass and metal.

  Homer stopped the car to look at it.

  "You've got everything," he said.

  "I think we have," said Steen proudly. "We've even got our own telephone exchange."

  "Isn't that unusual?"

  "Not at all. What we have set up here amounts to a model village, a model living space. We have our own water system and our sewage plant. Why not a telephone exchange?"

  Homer let it pass. There was no sense arguing. It all was just this side of crazy, anyhow. No matter how fouled up it was, Steen seemed satisfied.

  Maybe, Homer told himself, he knows what he is doing.

  But Homer doubted it.

  "One thing more," said Steen. "It is just a minor matter, but you should know about it. We have a car agency, you see. Many agencies, in fact. We can supply almost any make of car…"

  "But how did you do…"

  "We know our way around. Any make of car a person would want. And anyone who leases must buy a car from us."

  "Mister," Homer said, "I've heard a lot of fast ones in the auto business, but this one beats them all. If you think I'll sell cars for you…"

  "There's nothing wrong with it," said Steen. "We have some good connections. Any car one wants at a fair and honest price. And we are prepared to give good value on their trade-ins, too. It would never do to have old rattle-traps in a high-class development like this."

  "And what else? I think you'd better tell me how many other tie-in deals you have."

  "Not a single one. The automobile is all."

  Homer put the car in gear and drove slowly toward the gate.

  The uniformed gateman saw them coming and swung the gates wide open. He waved to them cheerily as they went past his kiosk.

  "I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole," Homer told his wife, Elaine, "if there weren't so much money in it. But things have been kind of slow with this higher interest rate and all and this deal would give me a chance…"

  "If it's Mr. Steen wearing his shoes on the wrong feet," Elaine said. "I don't think you need to worry. You remember Uncle Eb?"

  "Sure. He was the one who wore his vest inside out."

  "Pure stubbornness, that's what it was with Uncle Eb. He put it on inside out one day and someone laughed at him. So Uncle Eb said that was the way to wear a vest. And that's the way he wore it to his dying day."

  "Well, sure," said Homer, "that might be it, of course. But wearing a vest inside out wouldn't hurt your chest. Shoes on the wrong feet would hurt something terrible."

  "This poor Mr. Steen might be a cripple of some sort. Maybe he was born that way.

  "If you lease all those houses, we can go to Europe like we've always planned. As far as I'm concerned, he can barefoot if he wants."

  "Yeah, I suppose so."

  "And we need a car," Elaine said, beginning on her catalog "And drapes for the living-room. And I haven't had a new dress in ages. And it's shameful to be using our old silver. We should have replaced it years ago. It's the old stuff Ethel gave us when we were married…"

  "All right," said Homer. "If I lease the houses, if the deal holds up, if I don't get in jail—we'll go to Europe." He knew when he was licked.

  He read the contract carefully. It was all right. It said black and white, that he got the whole five thousand.

  Maybe, he told himself, he should have a lawyer see it. Congdon could tell him in a minute if it was ironclad. But he shrank from showing it. There seemed something sinful, almost shameful, about his getting all that money.

  He checked on the Happy Acres Bank. A charter had been issued and all regulations had been met. He checked on building permits and they were in order.

  So what was a man to do?

  Especially when he had a wife who had yearned loudly for ten years to go to Europe.

  Homer sat down and wrote an ad for the real estate section of the Sunday paper. On second thought he dismissed purple prose that he had planned to use. He employed the old key technique. The ad wasn't long. It didn't cost too much and read:

  $4.16!!!!!

  WOULD YOU PAY ONLY $4.16

  a month to live in a house

  that would sell for $35,000

  to $50,00O?

  If so, call or see

  JACKSON REAL ESTATE

  Specializing in Lake Property and Country Acreages

  The first prospect was a man named H. F. Morgan. He came into the office early Sunday morning. He was belligerent. He slammed the folded want ad section down on Homer's desk. He had ringed Homer's ad with a big red-pencil mark.

  "This isn't true!" yelled Morgan. "What kind of come-on is this?"

  "It's substantially true," Homer answered quietly. "That's what it figures out to."

  "You mean I just pay $4.16 a month?"

  "Well," hedged Homer, "it's not quite as simple as all that. You lease it for ninety-nine years."

  "What would I want with a house for ninety-nine years? I won't live that long."

  "Actually, it's better than owning a house. You can live there a lifetime, just as if you owned the place, and there are no taxes and no maintenance. And if you have children, they can go on living there."

  "You mean this is on the level?"

  Homer emphatically nodded. "Absolutely."

  "What's wrong with this house of yours?"

  "There's nothing wrong with it. It's a new house among other new houses in an exclusive neighbourhood. You have a shopping centre just up the road that's as good as any city…"

  "You say it's new?"

  "Right. There are fifty houses. You can pick out the one you want. But I wouldn't take too long to decide, because these will go like hotcakes."

  "I got my car outside."

  "All right," said Homer, reaching for his hat. "I'll take my car and show you the way. The houses are unlocked. Look at them and choose the one you want."

  Out on the street, Homer got into his car and sat down on something angular. He cursed because it hurt. He lifted himself and reached down and picked up the thing he'd sat on.

  It was nothing he had ever seen before and he tossed it to the other side of the seat. It was, he thought, something like one of those clip-together plastic blocks that were made for children but how it had gotten in his car, he could not imagine.

 
; He wheeled out into the street and signalled for the Morgan car to follow.

  There were Mrs. Morgan and Jack, a hell-raising eight-year-old, and Judy, a winsome five-year-old, and Butch, the Boxer pup. All of them, Homer saw, were taken by surprise at the sight of Happy Acres. He could tell by the way Mrs. Morgan clasped her hands together and by the way suspicion darkened Morgan's face. One could almost hear him thinking that no on was crazy enough to offer a deal like this.

  Jack and Butch, the pup, went running in the woods and Judy danced gaily on the lawn and, Homer told himself, he had them neatly hooked.

  Homer spent a busy day. His phone was jammed with calls. House-hunting families, suspicious, half-derisive, descended on the office. He did the best he could. He'd never had a crowd like this before. He directed the house-hunting families out to Happy Acres. He patiently explained to callers that it was no hoax, that there were houses to be had. He urged all of them to hurry and make up their minds.

  "They won't last long," he told them, intoning unctuously that most ancient of all real estate selling gimmicks.

  After church, Elaine came down to the office to help him with the phone while he talked to the prospects who dropped in.

  Late in the afternoon, he drove out to Happy Acres. The place was an utter madhouse. It looked like a homecoming or a state fair or a monster picnic. People were wandering around, walking through the houses. One had three windows broken. The floors were all tracked up. Water faucets had been left running. Someone had turned on a hose and washed out a fiowerbed.

  He tried to talk with some of them, but he made no headway.

  He went back to the office and waited for the rush to start.

  There wasn't any rush.

  A few phone calls came in and he assured the callers it was on the level. But they were still hard to convince. He went home beat.

  He hadn't leased a house.

  Morgan was the first one who came back. He came back alone, early Monday morning. He was still suspicious. "Look," he said, "I'm an architect. I know what houses cost. What's the catch?"

  "The catch is that you pay five thousand cash for a ninety-nine-year lease."

  "But that's no catch. That's like buying it. The normal house when it stands a hundred years, has long since lost its value."